


Right Back Where We Started From

by chaletian



Series: In Which The Enterprise Is Like A Village [18]
Category: Star Trek: Alternate Original Series (Movies)
Genre: Awesome Ladies Ficathon, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-07-01
Updated: 2013-07-01
Packaged: 2017-12-16 18:32:17
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 424
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/865243
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/chaletian/pseuds/chaletian
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The Academy teaches you a lot, about uncomfortable living quarters, about alien customs, about relative morality, about risk and danger and loss. The Academy teaches you a lot, but it never teaches you to deal with the fact that after five years in a tight space with a few hundred people, you have days when you just want to stab everyone in the head for the peace and quiet.</p>
<p>[Written for izzyfics' prompt at the Awesome Ladies Ficathon]</p>
            </blockquote>





	Right Back Where We Started From

At the end of the five years, Jan is desperate for home. She wants to wake up in her own bed and spread her arms and legs wide on sheets worn smooth with time and washing. Sheets in her parents’ home smell of lemon and verbena. Jan misses that when she rolls out of a narrow regulation bunk that’s too hard and too small and too damn shiny.  
  
She wants food that tastes the way her mind tells her it should. She wants her favourite soft drink served with cherries and ice, the way they do at the ice cream stand that has stood opposite her elementary school all the time she can remember. She wants to sit on the sidewalk with her friends, she wants to walk into the library in town, she wants to sit with her nephew and help him build plastic space ports higher than his head.  
  
But more than all this, she just wants to be alone. She wants to sit in a room for an hour, two hours, three, uninterrupted. She wants to prop her chin on her hand and stare out of a window, and have no-one come up to ask what she’s looking at. She wants to drive to town and speak to no-one.  
  
Janice thinks it’s the one thing they can never really prepare you for. The Academy teaches you a lot, about uncomfortable living quarters, about alien customs, about relative morality, about risk and danger and loss. The Academy teaches you a lot, but it never teaches you to deal with the fact that after five years in a tight space with a few hundred people, you have days when you just want to stab everyone in the head for the peace and quiet.  
  
(But maybe it’s just her. The captain slinks into the mess, a pile of padds under his arm and a glint in his eye and she knows her time with the news upload from Earth is over, but it pretty much never began because Chris has already been over with some highly sensitive gossip that she picked up from McCoy (who is a gossip whore, as much as he’d like to pretend otherwise), and Uhura wanted to correct a detail in one of Kirk’s mission reports, and Luce decided that today was the day to have a hormonal meltdown.)  
  
  
  
At the end of five years, Jan is desperate to be home, to be quiet, to be alone. But she knows she’ll be right back here when they fly away again.


End file.
